Teen Boys Should Care for Seniors
To grow into strength, learn how to use it for others
For anyone in the DC area, I’ll be speaking at CUA on Tuesday as part of a panel sponsored by the Institute for Humane Ecology. I’ll join Ross Douthat, Charlie Camosy, and Ari Schulman to consider “What is Euthanasia Doing to the West?” I’ll also be in Princeton on Friday for a pro-life panel.
And, in a very charming development, the CUA student pro-life group runs a babysitting service as part of their witness, so they’ll be taking care of my baby during the panel.
Lyman Stone periodically takes to twitter to (rightly!) advocate for a much broader culture of babysitting. In a tweet I can’t find, I recall him suggesting that parents of teens should think of part of their family’s church tithe as being rendered in time—lending out their older kids to watch other people’s younger kids. He doesn’t want to let grown ups off the hook, either.
It’s unusual for twentysomethings to babysit in their time off from work, but Lyman’s right that it’s certainly possible for share the load of childcare more broadly in a community. And if you can shift to that norm, it’s good for the twentysomethings, too! Babysitting isn’t a bad date when you’re dating seriously and thinking about how you might parent together.
Lyman was part of the inspiration for my most recent piece for Deseret, considering our culture’s limited cross-generation contact and what young men can do with their strength.
There’s another natural, but under-appreciated affinity between ages. More elder care should be taken on by teenaged boys. Aging seniors often need physical support, which may go beyond what their adult children and caretakers can provide. Teen boys need to be needed, and they need examples of how they can grow into someone that others can depend on.
For teen boys, adolescence is a time of growing into strength without necessarily knowing what to do with it. Team sports are a way to blow off energy and grow into brotherhood; shop class can be a way to learn to make a mark on the world. But it’s hard for young men to get experience with the other purpose of their strength — to be a support to someone weaker than themselves.
I’m very sympathetic to the arguments that Richard Reeves makes in
that we have a culture that often doesn't know what to do with boys. As they get bigger, stronger, and more impulsive, they're often met with a culture of "no"—sit still in class, get out of that tree, don't mess around or you'll ruin your future.I want them to have a good outlet for their energies and their strengths, rather than thinking all of these fires are meant to be banked until… college? marriage? retirement? Their strength is a gift meant to be passed on to the weak, and since they’re young for children of their own, look to the other end of the age spectrum for needs they can meet.
On a related note, I contributed a short reflection to Fairer Disputations’ symposium of responses to Erika Bachiochi’s First Things essay “Sex-Realist Feminism.”
For men, there’s also been an unsexing. A man who is just told not to abandon his child has not been called to the fullness of fatherhood. The emphasis on breadwinning similarly reduces a father to a generic parent (or worse, a mere payroll deposit).
A woman’s motherhood is more starkly physical; a baby’s demands during gestation and nursing are undeniable (despite our culture’s efforts to escape them). For men to participate in a sex-realist, pro-family movement, we have to articulate what is distinctive about men and their capacity for fatherhood.
This is one of the reasons I don’t think of Other Feminisms as a project just for women. When our society flattens or ignored the distinctive markers of men and women, that tends to hurt women first, but men also need to know how to be men well.
Easily the best example of using my strength for others that comes to mind is living with my grandmother during my first year and a half of grad school. As this also overlapped with the first year of covid, this gave me multiple responsibilities: mowing the lawn, shoveling snow, and helping move furniture were obvious things, but so was being the one to get groceries or pick up prescriptions during the lockdown. Spending time together was also important, often just through watching British detective shows or Jeopardy together (RIP Alex Trebek). Even after I moved out, we still went for dinner weekly until I moved to a new job last year. At the same time, I also came face-to-face with the difficulty of my own laziness and tendencies towards selfishness—was it worth sleeping in or going to a restaurant with friends if it meant that she might mow the lawn herself or get sick because I brought covid home? (The latter never happened, thankfully, but the former did.) My grandmother is an independent, stubborn, capable woman, and it was not an uncommon experience to come visit and find that she had moved a couch down to her basement all by herself, or to drive over (after I moved out) to shovel the driveway and find her out there, driveway shoveled, smirking and acting as though nothing was out of the ordinary. This slowly impressed on me the need to be less self-centered and more proactive in meeting the needs of others. This is still a work in progress, but as I've become engaged to a young woman who is similarly stubborn, extremely competent, and unwilling to ask for help for fear of being a burden, I've had to learn to anticipate her needs and offer my strength before it's requested—not so that I can do everything for her and fix all her problems (I can't, and she wouldn't want me to), but so that she knows that my strength, skill, and time are there for her.
A moment from my youth (I was a rising college sophomore, I think) that springs to mind occurred when I was a counselor at Shakespeare summer camp. We were having a midnight rehearsal in the immediate run-up to our performance of Julius Caesar. One of the girl campers, unfortunately, had a medical condition flare up and sort-of collapsed backstage. She was conscious but too weak to walk. We needed to get her from the theater to the camp nurse's office, and it seemed the quickest way to do this was to drape her over my back and have me carry her like a beast of burden. I recall thinking at the time, even though the situation was scary, that this was what it felt like to be a man. There was a real satisfaction in how clear it was that my strength and size was needed, even essential, in that moment. Everything all worked out okay. As I've recalled the incident since then it feels to me less like a crisis and more like a milestone.